Dustless Grinders and a Scarifyer from Metabo

OSHA’s proposed silica rule may mean you’ll do more of your work with tools like these.

If the OSHA’s proposed silica rules go through you’ll be doing a lot more wet cutting or cutting, grinding, and drilling with tools that connect to HEPA vacs. The tool companies seem to think some kind of rule will go through—which explains why so many of them are introducing grinders and rotary hammers that can be connected to vacuums. We’re not talking about the retrofit efforts of yesterday; we’re talking tools where the ability to efficiently collect dust is baked into the design.

Here are a few such tools I saw at the Metabo booth in January at the World of Concrete (video below). Given how much concrete dust tools of this kind can generate, it’s amazing to run them connected to vacs and see how little dust escapes.